


Dreams, Many-colored

by boundbyspells



Category: Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:08:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boundbyspells/pseuds/boundbyspells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>during Jane's autumn of teaching school at Morton, she dreamed often of Rochester</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreams, Many-colored

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beckymonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beckymonster/gifts).



I felt I became a favorite in the neighborhood. Whenever I went out, I heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with friendly smiles. To live amidst general regard, though it be but the regard of working people, is like "sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet;" serene inward feelings bud and bloom under the ray.

At this period of my life, my heart far oftener swelled with thankfulness than sank with dejection: and yet, reader, to tell you all, in the midst of this calm, this useful existence--after a day passed in honorable exertion amongst my scholars, an evening spent in drawing or reading contentedly alone--I used to rush into strange dreams at night. Always in these dreams, Rochester was by my side, or I was striving to meet him across some dark divide.

The first of these dreams startled me greatly; I awoke with tears on my cheeks and a fire within. Some great force propelled me violently from the curtainless bed, and I paced the sanded floors of my little cottage like a restless wraith, until I paused to throw wide my shutters. A few scattered lights on the hillside made me briefly feel as though I were not the only creature in the universe, burning and dying alone; and the gentle swirl of soft, chill rain that touched my face was a moderate relief.

But the searing memory of Rochester's presence in the dream returned to me, and the rain on my face was not enough, not nearly enough. I burst anew into a flame of longing. A cool, damp breeze, gentle but insistent, strained against the fabric of my night gown, trying to find a path through. I yielded to its touch with frantic urgency, clawing at the buttons and splitting open the neck of the gown, until autumn air roved over my unclothed flesh, pulling the buds of my bosom into peaks. I felt desperate and wanton, but there was no other way to still the fire.

When at last the air exhausted me of my heated yearning, I yanked close my nightgown, fastened my shutters, and crept wretchedly into my bed. He was not here! He would never be here. My tears renewed themselves; I cried out a wordless protest in the still, dark air of my cottage. I fell onto my bed in a convulsion of despair, until a shattered, dreamless sleep carried me to dawn.

But by nine o'clock the next morning I was punctually opening the school; tranquil, settled, prepared for the steady duties of the day.

Throughout the course of my day, the details of the dream slipped away--all I knew that I had been in Rochester's arms, heard his voice, met his eye, touched his hand and cheek... I had loved him; I had been loved by him. The hope of passing a lifetime at his side had been renewed with all its first force. The shock of finding myself alone had been nearly unbearable.

But now that I had forgotten the particulars of the dream, I was anguished. How could I have forgotten?

That night I threw myself into bed, praying to God that the dream would return.

And it did.

#

I was aboard a ship to the New World. I was myself; my clothes were as neat and gray as I would expect, and when I looked at myself in the glass, I was as plain as ever, though perhaps I possessed the slight prettiness that had shone in me at the height of my betrothal to Rochester.

When I went on deck--and I could smell the tang of brine and fish on the sea air--I was told that I had been invited to dine with the captain. The captain, of course, was Rochester, but it was strange--I knew him in my heart, but we were being introduced as though for the first time.

The meal was private, perhaps scandalously so, and his repartee through-out the meal was as lively and as provoking as ever I had expected from him. I basked in it; I did not keep up my end of the conversation entirely, for it was simply too good to be in his presence again, to see him hale and happy, not clouded by the darkness that I had always known to cling to him.

He told me a long story about being disinherited by his ambitious father when he refused to marry a Creole woman whose family was well-known for their madness. A kind uncle had taken pity on him and kitted him out with this vessel, the _Fairfax_ , and he had lived the life of a sea captain ever since.

Our pleasant dinner was interrupted then by the call of another ship sighted; and then alarm bells were rung, as the other ship was deemed to belong to some sort of pirate.

"Stay here," Rochester said roughly, thrusting a pistol into my hand. I lay the gun down on the table, and then promptly disobeyed the good captain. I knew I could help, in that way one knows things in dreams, for though I was myself, Jane Eyre, orphan and governess, I was also a child of the sea, a mermaid.

I crept from the captain's cabin to find myself in the midst of close combat; the pirates had boarded the _Fairfax_. I slid between Rochester's sailors and their enemies, narrowly avoiding a cutlass to the gut, until I attained the rail of the ship. Then, quick as a fish, I slid over the railing and into the sea, transforming myself to sea foam as I fell to the water.

It was passing strange to be sea foam, but I found my way around the ship, watching from the peaks of waves, until at last I crashed onto the deck, reforming myself into a human being as I hit the swabbed boards. I was exhilarated, wet, triumphant, even as I reached my arms around the pirate captain. I plucked him from his fight with Rochester, pulling him backward into the water. Reader, I drowned him, just as a proper mermaid would. Even as I did this evil deed, I thrilled. I would never forget the look of astonishment and delight on Rochester's face when he realized what and who his mousy guest truly was.

When I returned to the ship on another wave, I found the pirates subdued--the fight had gone out of them with their captain gone. Rochester sent me to his cabin to dry off and avoid the mop-up, though at this point I had clearly shown myself as blood-thirsty as any seaman.

He returned to his cabin some time later, to find me somnolent, wrapped in his blankets and trying to warm myself, exhausted from the exertions of the day. His presence enlivened me, however; upon his approach, I sat up, expectant and eager.

"Siren," he said in a low, keen voice, his face kindled, "You have bewitched me." He sat nearby on his bed, taking my hand in his. "What spell have you woven over me?"

"None; I have no spells," I said, finding my breath short and my pulse wild. He leaned toward me; I confess, I leaned toward him as well. I could not bear to tease him, to cross him and thwart him as I so often had, in a past that neither of us remembered in this dream; for that moment, I wanted only to feel his breast pressed to mine, his breath on my lips.

But I was to receive no kiss then; he diverged from his course, drawn by the sight of my unadorned feet. I had kicked away my wet boots as soon as I regained the cabin--somehow my magic did not entail losing any of my vestiments. A small convenience to my modesty, and later, I realized, the hallmark that this was truly a dream, a night born fantasy with no grounding in truth.

"No fish tail for this mermaid," Rochester said, sliding his hand beneath one foot, cradling its heel in his palm. His thick fingers whispered along the tips of my toes, and inside me, a well of longing opened up. "You're like ice! I would not thought a siren to be susceptible to the sea's cold." Strong, warm hands enclosed themselves around my feet, and a shudder rose through my body. The well of longing widened, and I closed my eyes.

The first wave of strong desire passed when I realized he was unmoving and silent, still holding my feet. I opened my eyes to find him gazing upon me. "Jane," he said solemnly. "May I?"

I knew then what he was asking. I slid one foot down and to the side, giving him consent by slight access. He slid his hand to my ankle, his thumb caressing the slight nobs of bone on the inner and outer side, his eyes alight with promise.

I had not known this adventure to be a dream, but I did nothing to preserve my integrity and virtue--as though I understood that there could be no real consequence to my actions in this world where I was Rochester's siren. I was eager to experience the full range of earthly delights at Rochester's hands--and mouth--so very eager that when the dream dissolved before any further attainment of consummation, I could do nothing but scream.

This time, when I launched myself from my bed, I did not allow the dream to flee. I picked up charcoal and paper, making sketch after sketch of the moments from the dream. The fight on the deck. My arms around the pirate's body as I snatched him from Rochester. The way my feet looked as they touched the deck and transformed from sea foam. Rochester's hand on my feet. Rochester's hand on my ankle. Rochester's eyes.

I would not lose this dream. I would not lose any such dream again. I worked from a state of feverish anguish, until the pictures were done--rough but extant--before throwing open my shutters again, and baring myself to the night. It was the only healing I could discover, the only way to extinguish the fire before it consumed me, and the only way to find sleep once more.

#

It was the fifth of November, and a holiday. My little servant, after helping me to clean my house, was gone, well satisfied with the fee of a penny for her aid. All about me was spotless and bright--scoured floor, polished grate, and well-rubbed chairs. I had also made myself neat, and had now the afternoon before me to spend as I would.

The translation of a few pages of German occupied an hour; then I got my palette and pencils, and fell to the more soothing, because easier occupation, of completing Rosamond Oliver's miniature. The head was finished already: there was but tinting and shading left. I was absorbed in the execution of the nicer details, when, after one rapid tap, my door unclosed, admitting St. John Rivers.

"I am come to see how you are spending your holiday," he said. "Not, I hope, in thought? No, that is well: while you draw you will not feel lonely."

My fingers paused in tinting Rosamund's azure eyelid, gulping back some retort that in fact drawing did not make me less lonely. But he could know nothing of my dreams, nothing of my drawings made from them; they were safely stowed beneath my bed, where I would pull them in the mornings and examine them before readying myself for the day. It was always--well, not pleasant--but invigorating to ruminate on the dreams that passed, to use the roughed out sketches to trigger the memories of those pleasant moments that my unconscious mind provided as a gift, when Rochester and I were companions once more.

St. John stooped to examine my drawing. His tall figure sprang erect again with a start: he said nothing. I looked up at him: he shunned my eye. I knew his thoughts well, and could read his heart plainly; at the moment I felt calmer and cooler than he: I had then temporarily the advantage of him, and I conceived an inclination to do him some good, if I could.

I endeavored to speak to him of Rosamund; having perceived that she liked him even better than he liked her, I pressed him on the matter. I discerned he was neither angry nor shocked at my audacity.

"She likes you, I am sure," I said, perceiving that to be thus frankly addressed on a subject he had deemed unapproachable--to hear it thus freely handled--was beginning to be felt by him as a new pleasure--an unhoped-for relief. “And her father respects you. Moreover, she is a sweet girl--you ought to marry her."

" _Does_ she like me?" he asked.

"Certainly; better than she likes anyone else. She talks of you continually: there is no subject she enjoys so much or touches upon so often."

"It is very pleasant to hear this," he said--"very: go on for another quarter of an hour." And he actually took out his watch and laid it upon the table to measure the time.

"But where is the use of going on," I asked, "when you are probably preparing some iron blow of contradiction, or forging a fresh chain to fetter your heart?"

"Don't imagine such hard things. Fancy me yielding and melting, as I am doing: human love rising like a freshly opened fountain in my mind and overflowing.”

I saw the look in his eye as he spoke; it was a look I imagined that I possessed when thinking about Rochester. I humored St. John and spoke freely: the watch ticked on: he breathed fast and low.

He called time in due course, and laid the picture down, to rise and stand on the hearth.

"Now," said he, "that little space was given to delirium and delusion. It is strange, that while I love Rosamond Oliver so wildly--with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion--I experience at the same time a calm, unwarped consciousness that she would not make me a good wife; that she is not the partner suited to me; that I should discover this within a year after marriage; and that to twelve months' rapture would succeed a lifetime of regret. This I know."

He went on to enumerate her faults, all the ways in which she was unsuited to be a missionary's wife. After a considerable pause, I said--"And Miss Oliver? Are her disappointment and sorrow of no interest to you?"

"Miss Oliver is ever surrounded by suitors and flatterers: in less than a month, my image will be effaced from her heart. She will forget me; and will marry, probably, someone who will make her far happier than I should do."

I found this explanation disingenuous, and told him so, pointing out his thinness from want of eating, his trembling and his blushing when Miss Oliver entered the room. I surprised him; he could not imagine that a woman would dare to speak so to a man. For me, I felt at home in this sort of discourse. It was ever how I spoke to Rochester, and he to me, in dreams and in the time before.

"You are original," said he, "and not timid. There is something brave in your spirit, as well as penetrating in your eye; but allow me to assure you that you partially misinterpret my emotions. You think them more profound and potent than they are. You give me a larger allowance of sympathy than I have a just claim to. When I color, and when I shade before Miss Oliver, I do not pity myself. I scorn the weakness. I know it is ignoble: a mere fever of the flesh: not, I declare, the convulsion of the soul. _That_ is just as fixed as a rock, firm set in the depths of a restless sea. Know me to be what I am--a cold, hard man."

I smiled incredulously. We traded further words, but I could not change him. I began to think he was as cold and as hard as he claimed, but that he lingered, murmuring over the portrait as he stood to leave.

#

That night in my dream, I did not meet with Rochester, but with St. John.

He was holding forth in the same bloodlessly impassioned fashion as he had earlier that day. “I am a cold, hard, ambitious man,” he said, his eyes as strong and piercing in their way as Rochester’s.

We were standing at the edge of a great precipice, overlooking a great, sprawling, ancient city, which I took to be Rome.

He gestured, extending his arm out over the city below us; he wore white robes like a Roman, and a wreath of laurel leaves in his hair; he looked as arrogant and as removed from the world as a statue of a pagan emperor. He continued: “Natural affection only, of all the sentiments, has permanent power over me. Reason, and not feeling, is my guide; my ambition is unlimited: my desire to rise higher, to do more than others, insatiable. I honor endurance, perseverance, industry, talent; because these are the means by which men achieve great ends and mount to lofty eminence.”

I was drawn by some compulsion to St. John’s side. He looked down at me, his handsome face smooth and cool. “I watch your career with interest, Jane, because I consider you a specimen of a diligent, orderly, energetic woman: not because I deeply compassionate what you have gone through or what you still suffer.”

“I don’t suffer,” I whispered, but I knew that I did. Some missing piece ached within me, some emptiness that I did not then understand nearly consumed me. Even as I took the hand that St. John offered, even as he pulled me close into the circle of his arms, and my breath quickened, I felt bruised somewhere deep in my heart.

His embrace was wonderfully heated, though I had expected marble; strangely, I felt not the least bit of self-consciousness to be touching him this way, though I knew it was not the embrace of a benefactor or a brother. My memories of St. John outside the dream fought with this moment, but all restraint was erased. "You suffer," he insisted, and his lips brushed the hair at my temple. Startled by this intimacy but craving more, I tilted my face up to him. His perfect lips met mine, in a kiss the began as chaste as I would have expected from St. John. But then his tongue swept into the aperture of my mouth. Shocked, my knees weakened, and I clung to his shoulders desperately.

 _This is how Rochester kissed you,_ said a fairy's voice in my ear. I jerked my head back from St. John. He stared down at me, gaze penetrating and deep. "Jane," he said with dark concentration. "I require you by my side, forever and for all time. The gods meant you to be an emperor's wife."

"You--you are not an emperor," I said uncertainly, taxed by this strange dream, unequal to it as I had never been unequal to any of the dreams that had featured Rochester, even though I did not yet realize this, too, was a dream like the others.

"I am not emperor--yet." He spoke with such arrogant conviction, staring out over the city, that he seemed possessed of a vision. I gasped, stunned by the audacity of a man who would say that. "It has been foretold. I am not under human guidance. I am not subject to the defective laws and erring control of my feeble fellow-worms. The augurs are certain: I shall be emperor: king, lawgiver, war-maker, Augustus. And you shall be my empress. You shall rule beside me, and give me sons."

"I--I--" I could not think of an objection. My mind was muddled, lost in the brightness of the day, in the blinding white of our robes, in the distant, sparkling city below us, in the memory of St. John's heat of body and coldness of mind. When he grasped me by the hips and pulled me to him once more, I was lost. He kissed me senseless, pressed to him with an ardor that seemed far from passionless. I knew--I _knew_ his passion was reserved for his ambition, and his ambition, at the moment, included me. But I was caught in it; and when he took me by the hand and led me to a near-by temple, "to be married according to the rites of Apollo and Venus," I did not refuse.

We climbed the stairs to the temple, hand-in-hand, and passed through an outer chamber that contained three circular pools of pristine, sapphire water. At the inner chamber we waited; a priest and a priestess approached us with censers bleeding smoke, chanting some sacred, pagan songs. I was dazed, lost in a fog of desire, though there was something familiar about standing near an altar, awaiting marriage, something that ached when I considered it.

That was when I noted the figures carved in relief on the side of the altar; there were faces among them that looked familiar. When the priest and priestess paused in their words, I slipped my hand from St. John's and knelt to look. There was a little girl I recognized, and a woman not much older than I, holding hands. "Helen," I murmured. "Miss Temple."

St. John called my name, but I ignored him. I searched onward, looking for more beloved faces. There! Bessie, the nurse at Gateshead. I frowned, puzzled. Why those three faces from my childhood? I searched and discovered visages known only from portraits: Uncle Reed, and my mother, and my Uncle John Eyre. _What had all these people in common?_ I wondered, 'til I found the smooth representations of Adèle and Mrs. Fairfax, then dear Diana and Mary.

They all loved me, I realized. These were the faces of the people who loved me, or had done.

I continued to look over the carvings, searching, searching. St. John called my name again, sternly, and I thought for a moment I was searching for his face, for certainly I had not yet seen it. But then, when I found a different face, a less perfect face--a face that was, in fact, ugly, but for the love I felt for it--that was when I knew who I was truly seeking.

"Rochester." The name fell unbidden from my lips.

It was as if saying his name summoned him. He stepped into the inner sanctum, a whole man, a living man, and proved himself more than simply a tiny face carved of stone. My heart swelled like a raisin in pudding, til I thought it would come into my throat and choke me.

"You exist," I said, so relieved that my knees buckled beneath me. He caught me ere I fell, and scooped me into strong arms. His mouth sought mine; I remembered only faintly the kisses I had exchanged with St. John. The thrill St. John had caused seemed nothing compared to the thrill I felt now. And his kisses were as nothing; St. John had briefly ignited a candle-flame within my body, but what kindled in Rochester's presence was an all-consuming fire that burned through body, mind, heart, soul.

Rochester bore me out of the inner sanctum, away from the cloying incense, away from St. John and the priest and priestess. He sat with me on his knee, at the edge of one of the sapphire pools. I clung to his shoulders, and met his burning eye.

"Never leave me again," I ordered.

"Jane," he said softly, pushing back a lock of my hair. "It was you who left me."

The dream broke apart then, like an enormous sea-side castle suddenly giving up its purchase on the earth and sliding into the ocean. I fell, and woke.

#

It was the first dream in months that did not stir me to a full fever. I did not bother to sketch the memories of this dream, too troubled by them to want to remember well; when I drifted to the window and opened the shutters, I did not feel compelled to bare my skin to the cold air to regain my senses.

I stared into the night for a long time, wrapped in my shawl. I thought of all the dreams that had accompanied my nights through the autumn: dreams many-colored, agitated, full of the ideal, the stirring, the stormy--dreams where, amidst unusual scenes, charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic chance, where I still again and again met Mr. Rochester, always at some exciting crisis.

"I miss you," I said, touching the frosted windowpane.

Outside, the season's first snow fell, and made no promises.


End file.
